Analyzing Anti-Trans Arguments

Disclaimer: Since writing it I've realized this post is not very good--not because the arguments it attacks are good (they're still terrible), but because the methodology I use here is something I no longer endorse. Particularly, I think I play extremely fast and loose with philosophy of language in a way that reads to me now as just arrogant.

      In response to recent violence against queer communities and anti-trans legislation, discourse surrounding trans people and the credibility of self-identification is becoming more hostile and more widespread. A few common arguments can be identified on the conservative side that are being offered by conservative pundits, social media influencers, and even some philosophers of gender to criticize trans-inclusive accounts of gender and discredit trans self-identification. The purpose of this essay is to deconstruct the form of three of these arguments, the commitments needed to view them as sound, and their dialectical functions. I conclude that none of the arguments are good.

        I hope this is a good resource for those who are supportive of the trans community and I hope for those who are not that they are convinced that these arguments fail.

Argument #1: argument from analogy

One of the most common anti-trans arguments is an argument from analogy that aims to discredit gender self-identification by comparing it to a situation where self-identification is inappropriate. For example, “I can’t just identify as a wolf.” The argument’s form is something like this:

(i) an x self-identifying as an F is insufficient for it to be an F; (ii) womanhood is relevantly similar to F-ness in this regard; therefore (iii) an x self-identifying as a woman is insufficient for it to be a woman.

(i) is a stipulation, (iii) is a pseudo-logical derivation that I think is valid, leaving (ii) as the crucial premise for the argument’s success. A preliminary concern before addressing the full argument is how we are to cash out “relevant similarity”. The term “relevantly” suggests that there is a specific resemblance being pointed to that is fixed contextually–in this case by what we are trying to show about self-identification in the case of Fs and women. This leads me to a semantics of relevant similarity where φ is relevantly similar to ψ in regard P just in case it is true of φ that P and true of ψ that P. The potential similarity between F-ness and womanhood targeted by the argument is the insufficiency of self-identification for satisfying either predicate–meaning the truth condition for (ii) is that self-identification as a woman is insufficient for satisfying the description of woman as self-identification as an F is insufficient for satisfying the description of F. But isn't this what the argument is supposed to substantiate? A person who does not antecedently accept (iii) cannot accept (ii) when presented with it.

Let's look at how this potential problem surfaces in a specific argument. Here's how the "wolf" argument I alluded to above looks when regimented as an argument about relevant similarity:

(i') an x self-identifying as a wolf is insufficient for it to be a wolf; (ii') womanhood is relevantly similar to wolf-ness in this regard; therefore (iii) an x self-identifying as a woman is insufficient for it to be a woman.

Given the notion of relevant similarity that was just teased out, (ii') by itself implies the conjunction of (i’) and (iii). Someone who antecedently rejects that self-identification is insufficient for womanhood rejects the latter conjunct and thus the relevant similarity between womanhood and wolf-ness. So the argument from analogy cannot bring its target to the revision of their worldview because they do not accept the steps the argument takes to get them there.

Another way to couch the dialectical inertia of the argument from analogy is that its proponents must begin by projecting their semantics of gender onto trans people. Proponents of the argument which maintain that womanhood, like wolf-ness, mainly consists in a series of physiological characteristics assume that a trans person self-identifying as a woman is wrongly claiming to exhibit the relevant physiological features. This gives itself to the kind of parodying expressed by the argument from analogy. But of course, trans women are not often using woman to describe merely physiological characteristics when they self-identify as women. They make use of different semantics and different application conditions, and therefore have no reason to think the sufficiency of self-identification for womanhood is absurd.

The argument from analogy provides no support to the transphobic position that it merely restates.

        

Argument #2: argument from floodgates

Another common anti-trans argument is that validating trans peoples’ identities “opens the floodgates” to unacceptable kinds of transitioning like racial transitioning. The argument is often presented as a reductio against self-identification as a sufficient condition for belonging to a gender category (hereafter referred to as the sufficiency condition). The indirect proof goes something like this:

(iv) (Assume for reductio) a person can change their gender through self-identification; (v) if a person can change their gender through self-identification, they can change their race through self-identification; but (vi) a person can’t change their race through self-identification; therefore (vii) a person can’t change their gender through self-identification.

(vi) is asserted as common ground between the target of the argument and its proponent, and (vii) follows through modus tollens if (v) is right. This means the argument depends on (v) to establish a contradiction.

My first step in evaluating (v) is prodding why race and gender might be analogous such that the sufficiency condition would have to apply to both jointly and could not apply to just gender or just race. There are a few views one might hold where gender and race do look symmetrical in this way. For example, an essentialism wherein racial and gender categories purport to carve nature at its joints. Under this view, terms like “woman” explicate a category whose boundaries are drawn along physiological lines, and words like “black” refer to biological characteristics. Therefore on essentialism both race and gender are determined externally by bodily features. Alternatively, one could hold a barebones social-positioning account of race and gender in which someone belongs to a given race or a given gender if they are privileged or disadvantaged in virtue of the presence of the corresponding bodily features. On both of these views, race and gender are symmetrical because they depend on similar external features that are not altered by self-identification (e.g. bodily features or their social consequences). But the argument is meant to target those who hold trans-inclusive views which endorse the sufficiency condition for gender, so it cannot rely on these symmetrical accounts of gender and race. The argument, to successfully perform its role as a reductio, would have to show a problem in the target's views of race and gender.

This prompts the question “what trans-inclusive views does this argument work against?” I don’t know. I’m not sure who jointly accepts that self-identification is sufficient for belonging to a gender category and (v). Close to none of the extant views of race allow for the sufficiency condition for racial categories[1]. This means that if someone accepts the sufficiency of self-identification for belonging to a gender category and also accepts almost any of the extant views about race, to them the antecedent of (v) is true but the consequent is false (i.e. the conditional is false). This puts a burden upon the proponent of the argument to support symmetrical views of gender and race. Additionally, many of the extant trans-inclusive accounts of gender are methodologically amerliorative rather than purely descriptive, which would implore that the word “can” in argument 2 be cast in normative, rather than descriptive terms[2]. Dembroff and Payton 2020 addresses this version of argument 2, arguing that there are a range of amelrioative and pragmatic reasons to endorse and facilitate gender transitioning but not racial transitioning.

To be charitable to argument 2, it pokes at the intuition that race and gender are very closely analogous–an intuition that makes it interesting to ask why people accept accounts of race so different from their accounts of gender. This question requires a more thorough look at the methodologies in the philosophies of gender and race and at the landscape of views, so I will leave it for another time.

Argument #3: argument from language

The argument from language I will address is one that argues that the inappropriateness of self-identification can be derived from the word “woman” itself. The argument is very simple. It goes like this:

(viii) “Woman” means “adult human female”; (ix) trans women are not adult human females; therefore (x) trans women are not women.

This is a separate argument than the ones made by philosophers of gender that conclude that the best definition of woman is “adult human female.” These cases are very explicit in stating that adult human female is theoretically, practically, and/or normatively the superior definition. Rather, the argument I’ve presented is popular among influential conservative pundits such as Matt Walsh, who made this argument several times in his 2022 documentary “What is a Woman?” without making clear his metaphilosophical commitments or objectives. Though I do not ordinarily endorse engaging with the weakest forms of arguments, the scope of this essay is not to evaluate what the best definition of “woman” is, it is to analyze the quality and function of popular arguments. And while the work of essentialist philosophers of gender is mostly confined to academia, due to Walsh and a range of other conservative commentators, argument 3 is popular.

The success of argument 3 is contingent on what relation is supposed to be picked out by the phrase “means” in (viii). One possible definition is that “means” is shorthand for “is used to mean.” If this is how we are to understand the term “means,” then the proposition that “‘woman’ means ‘adult human female’” is an empirical observation about what the word signifies in a linguistic community. Call this relation meansL. A word W meansL X if W’s usage in a linguistic community or group of linguistic communities L is as an expression of X. Perhaps in the speaker’s linguistic community or even a majority of linguistic communities, woman ordinarily means adult human female. This premise is not strong enough to give its advocates what they want. If we read “means” as meansL, (viii) states only that woman is used to express the concept of adult human female in L. All that can be validly derived from this is that in L, trans women are often not categorized as women. If “means” is limited in domain to just a specified set of linguistic communities, then (viii) can’t be extrapolated into a further reaching linguistic or metaphysical claim like (x). But does the proponent of the argument just want to express the empirical fact that in some linguistic communities, the description often intended by woman does not extend to trans women? I doubt it. I doubt it because doing so is toothless. This approach would concede that in many linguistic contexts, trans women are women because this reflects the accepted usage of the term in those contexts. This does not allow for the charge that trans women are using woman wrong—their usage looks just as valid as the proponent of the argument’s unless the argument is supplemented with reason to privilege the latter’s usage of the term. Depending on the specific trans-inclusive theory of gender the target of the argument accepts, they may well concede the argument with no change to their affirmation of trans women if meansL is the only understanding of meaning in play[3].

This is why I expect that the proponent of the argument means something more robust. I think that Matt Walsh is doing not linguistic analysis but metaphysics: his desired conclusion is not that trans women are sometimes or often not deemed women, but rather that trans women are not women. Advocates of this argument like Walsh, given their constant reference to the supposedly overriding reality of biology in determining gender, think woman is a natural kind coextensive with (or perhaps identical to) adult human female. This stronger premise carries a far heavier evidential burden–one that is not nearly relieved by linguistic observations. As Robin Dembroff argues in their forthcoming paper “Escaping the Natural Attitude about Gender,” in order to derive that woman is a natural kind coextensive with adult human female from language alone, we have to wrongly suppose that natural language is a reliable guide to metaphysical structures. So long as we think that like other words, woman gets its meaning and application conditions from its accepted usage and the verbal dispositions of those in the relevant linguistic communities, it is implausible that its meaning and application conditions would perfectly, or even closely map onto metaphysical kinds which are not subject to accidents of language and culture like accepted usages are. Furthermore, given the disparate usages of woman between different contexts within linguistic communities and between different linguistic communities, I am left wanting reason to believe that only the meaning adult human female should be selected for guiding us through woman as a metaphysical category.

Footnotes

1 I will not extensively defend the claim that most extant views on race don’t render self-identification as sufficient for belonging to racial categories. A brief outline of many of these views can be found in Burgos and James 2020, almost all of which rely on features external to one’s self-identification (e.g. ancestry, bodily features, social positioning, etc.) I do not at the moment rule out the compatibility of some of these views with a sufficiency condition, but the unpopularity of such a view on race suggests that the dialectical success of argument 2 is limited.

2 Perhaps a sentence like “a person can change their gender through self-identification” could be changed to “gender categories should be revised such that self-identification is sufficient for changing one’s gender.”

3 For example, an ameliorative inquirist that acknowledges that common language is exclusionary but seeks to change this state of affairs would not need to reject that in many linguistic communities—perhaps even the dominant ones—trans women do not satisfy the description commonly intended by woman. They would just additionally believe that this usage ought to be altered.